How to use it?

Just install the program and connect to the BitlBee server with your
favourite IRC-client. You will be force-joined into the control channel
where root (the bot, your assistant, the bee) will try to help you to get
the program working.

As soon as you get your accounts working, you can add users to your contact
list and talk to them, just like you normally do on IRC. Open a query, talk
to the person in the channel, or even talk to them in groupchats that will
look to you like just another IRC channel.

If you don't want to (or can't) install BitlBee on your own machine you
can also use one of the public servers. If you
use Windows, this is the preferred option, unless you use cygwin.

BitlBee 3.4.2

2016-03-19 23:27 UTC

BitlBee 3.4.2 is available for download now. This time with 128 commits from 10 contributors. Full changelog. Highlights:

irc: Self-messages (messages sent by yourself from other IM clients). IRCv3.1 support and part of 3.2. Many important groupchat related bugfixes.

jabber: Carbons, see help set carbons. Removed facebook XMPP, use bitlbee-facebook instead. SASL ANONYMOUS login, see help set anonymous.

hipchat: Channels can now be added with chat add hipchat "channel name" which tries to guess the channel JID. Read more

skype: Show all messages as groupchats since we can't tell which ones are private. This plugin is mostly-deprecated and mostly-broken, use the skypeweb purple plugin or msn instead.

MSN: Undead. May ask you for brains. Update to this release and use it.

Google talk: Same as before. Not dying.

Update: Forgot to mention: user-guide.{txt,html} are not included in the default build anymore, as part of the documentation changes. They were a 'flattened' version of the built-in help, and very few users were aware of their existence, so they are gone.

The html version is now available here. Note that some parts (such as the installation section) are very outdated. This will be fixed soon™.

BitlBee 3.4

2015-03-17 13:37 UTC

BitlBee 3.4 is available for download now. It's a big release, with 123 commits from 11 contributors. Full changelog. Highlights:

Twitter Filter channels - Search by keyword/hashtag or a list of users. See the wiki page for more details!

Google talk:Not dying. It mostly works, just no groupchats. Consider using hangups if you need those.

MSN: Dead in this release. Two years after they announced it would shut down, microsoft actually retired MSNP18. See also ismsndeadyet.com. There's a work in progress branch (soon to be merged into develop) that fixes it by using MSNP21 instead.

Also, the main development repository moved to github, because all the cool kids use git now. (well, actually because dx took over as a core developer)

BitlBee 3.2.2

2014-07-05 21:53 UTC

BitlBee 3.2.2 is available for download now. If you want to know what's new,
just read the changelog. tl;dr: If you care about OTR, you do want this
version.

From now on, new versions will only be announced via the Twitter account,
because really these news posts were just a third rehashing of the
changelog.dx edit: disregard that, writing announcements is fun.

BitlBee 3.2.1 fixes Twitter issues

2013-11-28 00:15 UTC

BitlBee 3.2.1 was just released, which should fix compatibility issues with
Twitter introduced by HTTP/1.0
deprecation.

If you're using im.bitlbee.org or testing.bitlbee.org you
shouldn't have to do anything, they're already updated.

Facebook chat disabled for no clear reason

2013-01-19 14:34 UTC

If you're having troubles using Facebook chat with BitlBee, that's a known
issue. Facebook have revoked
BitlBee's API keys last night without giving
any reason. All I received is two mysterious e-mails. Also, my Facebook
account was disabled. But that might have been for different reasons since
I don't remember the last time I used it. TBH I'm impressed I recognised
enough pictures of my contacts to be able to restore it. :>

To make matters worse, in their communication to users connected to their chat
from BitlBee, they say "You can contact the app admin for more information".
I can assure you, I know as much as you do.

I've heard rumours that a whole bunch of chat apps were disabled, not just
BitlBee. No clue what's going on, but in the meantime you can switch back to
password-based authentication.

No clue whether it will come back. I've clicked the Appeal button so let's
find out whether anyone reads what ends up there other than character device
1:3. We'll see, I'm not going to waste too much effort on it myself.

Update: As always, pay attention to the date on posts like this. This
problem got resolved within a day or so IIRC.

BitlBee 3.2

2013-01-06 23:49 UTC

Now available: BitlBee 3.2. Get it while it's hot! It adds support for
Twitter API version 1.1, which will be required from March this year.
But even without that it's a huge improvement over previous versions,
with support for the streaming API and direct messages.

BitlBee 3.0.5

Twitter problems?

2012-01-11 01:09 UTC

If you have problems keeping your Twitter connection open, this is a known issue
caused by bad behaviour on Twitter's end. In some cases this may also cause
crashes due to faulty error handling in BitlBee.

A fix to work around this annoying behaviour was committed to bzr and
is live on the two main public servers for a while now. Also, the
nightly builds have the fix.

If the problems with Twitter persist, a 3.0.5 release may come soon.

BitlBee 3.0.4

2011-12-04 19:44 UTC

It took a while, but BitlBee 3.0.4 is finally ready. Get it while it's hot,
if you aren't already running bzr snapshots anyway. :-)

BitlBee 3.0.3

2011-06-12 12:26 UTC

BitlBee 3.0.3 is ready. Rushed out a bit because Twitter broke for
many of us. This release should fix it, by using the "new" and preferred
way to download your contact list.

For now, you should also be able to use the following work-around to make
older versions work: account twitter set base_url http://api.twitter.com/1.
This workaround isn't perfect though. Please upgrade, if you can.

3.0.3 has some other nice changes. If you want to know it all, just read
the changelog.

BitlBee 3.0.2

2011-03-08 07:06 UTC

Keeping it short again: BitlBee 3.0.2 is ready! Mostly bug fixes,
and a few new toys.

BitlBee 3.0.1

2010-11-24 22:55 UTC

BitlBee 3.0.1 is ready! Mostly bug fixes, not a lot of new stuff.

ICQ issues

2010-11-15 23:17 UTC

As you may or may not know,
AOL sold ICQ
a little while ago. The new owner, DST, is moving the service to
their own servers around now. The result is that you (or at least
some people) can no longer log into ICQ via the AOL servers.

BitlBee currently defaults to using login.messaging.aol.com
for all OSCAR accounts, both AIM and ICQ. This is
fixed in bzr.
You don't have to upgrade to get ICQ to work again, just tell
BitlBee to use login.icq.com again. You can do this using
a command like this:

acc icq set server login.icq.com

See help account set for details; if you don't run BitlBee
3.0 yet, or if you have multiple ICQ accounts, this may not work.

BitlBee 3.0, more Bitl than ever.

2010-10-22 01:05 UTC

Finally, the next major release is there! Almost five years after the last
major release, it was about time. Who would've thought that this one would
take even longer than going from 0.7 to 1.0 (which "only" took three years)?

There are so many changes in this version, including some very old major
requests like a complete core rewrite, OTR encryption, a significant upgrade
of the MSN protocol module, optional support for libpurple, file transfers.. The
last one used to be the "Duke Nukem Forever" in the BitlBee community. Looks like
we won!

This all seems enough to bump the major version number. Since, looking at the
timing of previous versions, it's waaaay late to release a BitlBee 2 at this
point, let's go for 3.0 immediately. :-)

For the curious, there's also a short
screencast that demonstrates some of the new features. If you haven't
tried the multi-channel stuff yet, do take a look!

Anyway, go and download the thing. Many people were running this stuff
from Bazaar already, so join the club. :-) Have fun, and thanks everyone
for your continued support! (And in all modesty, let me remind you guys
that we're also on Flattr. :-)